Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 2:04 pm on 9 May 2018.
Thank you very much. I'd be grateful if you could confirm whether precision agriculture would specifically fall within the remit of that review. The Assembly's economy committee this morning has been holding hearings on the subject, and has heard how precision agriculture is already helping improve productivity on farms, as well as reducing environmental impacts. We were told very clearly that data is now seen as an agricultural product. But the support available from the Welsh Government is fragmented and inflexible. Farming Connect, for example, can only be used to fund 10 soil tests, which isn't enough, and is only available to fund basic GPS. It's been some time now since the National Assembly voted to ask the Welsh Government to develop a strategy for precision agriculture, so that we see this not just as a farming issue, but as an issue for Wales's resilience, to create an industry—so, rather than importing the robots from China and the software from America and exporting our data, seeing how we can harness this for the good of Wales. I would be grateful if the Cabinet Secretary could outline a timeline of when we can expect that strategy to be developed.